by on May 16, 2013

The Kindness of Strangers

I spend my days with my nose in WordPress with an ever present contemplation of how to scale without taking away too much control from the end-users. WordPress ain’t Sharepoint, where you want to lock things down so people don’t cause trouble. Half the fun of WordPress, for the individual site admins, is moving widgets around, trying out plugins, that kind of thing. I love when people tell me how much fun they had with a plugin. To make an enterprise system a platform for individual creativity and inspiration is one of the keys to keeping content fresh — if people are having fun, they tend to want to go in and fiddle with things more.

So I see my developer role not simply as making cool stuff happen, but allowing others to make cool stuff happen. No one gets inspired simply by typing in text or updating typed-in text. That’s boring. People want to easily do the things that pop into their heads: embed video, add a twitter feed, do a slideshow, include audio.

Since we are a small shop, I’ve developed a strategy of only building the plugins and theming elements that are idiosyncratic to my institution: incorporating institutional data, authentication, institutional search, branding, etc. For the rest of the desirable coolness that I or our site admins can dream up, the WordPress repository is filled with all sorts of stuff that’s worth trying.

WordPress has grown so huge in terms of its plugin base that it can boggle the mind searching for what you need. I moderated a discussion at UVa about Drupal vs. WordPress. One of the arguments for Drupal was that it takes a village to get modules and plugins submitted to their codebase, therefore ensuring integrity. With WordPress, you only need to upload your plugin to the codex and, voila! You’re a developer, too.

This wild west kind of approach is anathema to many developers. But as with all things crowdsourced, to me, this simply shifts the burden of ensuring plugin integrity to those of us who try out and use plugins developed by others. Absent guidelines, I have found the following to help in selecting plugins that I am confident enough in to deploy to an enterprise WordPress CMS:

  • Know thy developers: Check out the author of the plugin and follow links to their other work. That can be a clue as to who is most reliable.
  • Last Updated: Check that the update has been within the last 12 months. If not, don’t bother. It’s been abandoned.
  • Support Forum Responses: If the support forum has few (or no) reliable responses on it, you may want to look elsewhere.
  • Reach out through Social Media: Ask online about plugins that have you feeling ambivalent and see if folks have any good or bad experiences, or can suggest alternatives.

Finally, note that you will be responsible for these plugins once you have deployed them. They could be abandoned down the road, so, be vigilant and review for updates (and alternatives) regularly. These days, WordPress has gotten very good at letting you know when things are getting a little stale.

For those who want more support, I am not adverse to premium themes and plugins. As a matter of fact, there are a few that I think are must-haves when deploying WordPress as an enterprise CMS. The cost is usually minimal, and it can save you TONS of development time. I like that cottage industries are popping up around WordPress, enabling folks to eek out a bit of a living from their work. In the past couple of years, I’ve only encountered one vendor where I thought the price was outrageous — and the price dropped a year later. So, I think that the community is quite self-regulating in this regard. Here are a few guidelines for when to pay those dollars:

  • Test the free stuff first: Search the repository for every possible free plugin that does the same thing. If you settle on the premium plugin, test its free version first (they usually have a “free” version for download). Lots of times, the free version can be fully functioning, but only allow for a single site installation. If it’s just so awesome you gotta have it…
  • Reach out to social media: As with the free ones, ask if anyone’s using it and if it’s worth the cost
  • Consider annual licensing: Make sure that your budget will allow you to renew if the terms are annual
  • Keep vigilant about ongoing alternatives: WPTouch Pro was all the rage a few years ago. Now that responsive design is here, a good responsive framework (like Genesis) may be all you need to go mobile to start.

Finally, here is my list of “must-haves” (as of today — it could change) of WordPress plugins and things that will put a small development shop in the enterprise CMS business very quickly:

  • Networks+: Enables you to develop multiple networks on a single install. A lifesaver when you need multiple domains with multiple sub-directories. Developed by the extraordinary Ron Rennick. Price: $29.95.
  • Genesis Framework: This is like the WordPress core extended out as far as it can with all kinds of hooks that will get you going FAST developing powerful theme features. Responsive out of the box, and has a huge user base with documentation all over the web and vigilant updates. Genesis is a developer’s framework — it’s not for newbies. You need to understand WordPress thoroughly to get this going, but it’s a great way of putting a wide, quality developer community behind you. Developed by StudioPress, a division of CopyBlogger Media which is a group of leading WP developers (including Ron and Andrea Rennick). You can’t go wrong here. Price: $59.95.
  • Gravity Forms: Perhaps the single most bang for your buck for any WordPress premium plugin out there. Naive users can create HTML forms on the fly. Can create simple surveys and other site interaction. Better than email forms because it maintains full reports of form data within the WordPress administrative backend. Constantly providing add-ons. Developed by the talented and delightfully surly Carl Hancock. Price: $199.
  • Types and Views: Types is a free plugin that allows the creation of custom post types. Views, its premium cousin, then allows for custom layouts to display the custom post types and corresponding metadata. Powerful because you no longer need to build PHP code into your functions.php file — these can be done on a site-by-site basis for more sophisticated users. If you like what you do, you can export the types and views for use elsewhere. Price for Views: $95.
  • WordPress101 Plugin:  This plugin delivers WordPress tutorial videos to the administrative panel. This has saved me many, many visits to users for training. The self-guided videos provide basic instruction in the WordPress interface for the novice. Support is superb! Developed by Mark Jaquith (whom you may have heard of) and Shawn Hasketh .  Price: $19/month OR $190 annual.
  • Slidedeck Developer License: There are many free slideshows out there, and a free Slidedeck plugin,  but the developer license gives you unlimited sites and custom “lens” development. The backend admin is far and away the most favored by users. Custom lens development has a bit of a learning curve, but is quite powerful when you get used messing around inside the spaghetti code. Price: $149 (Note: this is the one that was going for $299 a few years ago when I chose NOT to buy it :)

In short, we don’t have to go it alone. There are so many folks out there doing good things, some for free, some for donations, some for a small price. But, let the community keep you from going crazy.

 

Filed Under: enterprise systems, WordPress Tagged With: ,
by on March 24, 2013

Having the Wrong Conversation (Dancin’ with Myself)

Did you ever have one of those moments where you look around at your peers and realize that they are having an entirely different conversation from the one you have been having in your head? This happens to me on a pretty regular basis, leading alternately to fits of unbounded creativity and periods of doubting dysphoria. The unbounded creativity is usually preceded by rapid-firing thoughts that look like DNA in my head: linked, but unlinking and recombining and building something you can’t see yet. The blueprint is drawn as the building is erected (which may explain my lifetime love for the work of Antonio Gaudí).

I’m in one of those unbounded modes, and putting things to words during these periods can be trying, but I will try.

We are in the process of putting together sessions for an upcoming technology conference at UVa, specifically sessions on the issue of web design. This necessarily puts me in touch with my peers throughout the institution, and gives me an idea of the overall institutional consciousness about developing for and using the web. Deliciously so, folks are all over the map, which is one of the things I love about higher education. But there are times when what we are NOT discussing can be louder than what we ARE discussing.

We all work within the realm that we are given. With the web, that realm can be frustratingly narrow due to the legacy of print and how it gave rise to webmasters to begin with. When webmasters started, it was in response to a new imperative that institutional information, usually bound in brochures, catalogues, and other printed matter, be put on the web. As a result, we created positions, and in some cases, departments, dedicated to this narrow proposition of replicating content in digital form.

The needs of the web are much more demanding now, but the way we think about and pursue higher education web development is still, it would appear, in service to this need. So the conversation centers on which systems are best to suit that original need: WHICH CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM SHOULD I USE?

Ugh.

I’m not going to rehash why that’s a boring question.

The web is no longer about managing content. It’s about channeling constantly proliferating content into interfaces that can parse and make sense of them for a particular user in a particular space and time. As much as I love WordPress, and oh I do love WordPress, it is not a definitive answer to managing content. It’s an authoring space, one of many authoring spaces, and can be tricked out to be more of an aggregation space, or content management system, when in the right hands. It was conceived as, and continues to be, a great user-friendly method for creating and deploying text to the internet. WordPress, any CMS really, is not an end in itself.

I’m not that interested in discussions of WordPress beyond how to continue the tricking out of it — that is, discussions which allow me to further the use of a tool that I can now manage pretty well in service to allowing others to author content in a relatively painless way. I AM interested in conversations about how we conceptualize web content in a more open context, assuming that we all are kind of bound to one CMS or another to deliver it to an interface, and ultimately, a user in a way the creates meaning.

This came home to me in a meeting we had here at the School of Medicine with a clinical department looking to have better outreach for patients. In short, the desire was to have the web enable people to be able to find a doctor and appropriate clinic location based on their ailment within a particular discipline. Here is a case where the CMS-as-all-knowing repository approach — that is, the decision to bind information within parallel CMS environments — created confusing and conflicting user experiences.

There are two websites for each clinical department, and each department has bifurcated audiences. For example, in this scenario, the Orthopedic Surgery department has an outward audience of people needing to find an orthopedic doctor. But, for purposes of the school, it has another functional life, with policies, procedures, and other web-bound content based on the training of physicians. The complexity within this department mirrors the complexity of every clinical department.

In service to trying to make things easier for patients, a separate site was built in a separate environment, designed to list clinics, services, etc. in a way that allows patients to find information without having to wade through things that a resident in that specialty needs to find something more internal in nature. This was a sound impulse, but using the CMS-as-all-knowing-terminal-repository model, the execution has left us with two separate environments in which content is authored separately. The content is bound within pages (albeit, data-driven pages, but pages nonetheless). What is essentially, on the patient side, directory information with helpful copy is authored within a standalone system that is built to share content objects with itself.

The results are not so pretty. The School of Medicine gets a lot more traffic probably because it has more interlinking content used by a more complex audience. Google doesn’t know that one is for patients and one is for the school — it just algorithms to its own drummer. As a result, a Google search leads you to the School of Medicine, not to the patient site. And you can write the rest of the story.

All of this could have been abated if the CMS model were abandoned for a model that puts data before authoring. We rush to author things in pretty packages because that’s what we did with print. The need for a separate patient site is absolutely, incontrovertibly, a great idea. But the rush to design and author a SITE rather than to understand the data and how it is shared beforehand has led to something of a quagmire.

There are other considerations at work that point me to the need for higher education to think of content aggregation and sharing FIRST before websites are authored.

As I encounter more and more higher education website questions, it seems that this issue of shared data, for all of our CMS talk, is still not coming to fruition. It seems to me that a LOT of our problems that many of us across this vastly complex institution face could be better shared by discussing the data we share rather than determining the systems we will use to author data that never sees the world outside of its CMS. By all means, let’s keep our CMS’s, but we need to talk about which content needs to live in a more robust shared data environment before hanging our CMS-authored pages/posts/articles, etc. on that scaffold.

Ten years ago, the CMS was seen as the answer to redundant content across an institution. Yet, because the larger conversation about shared data BETWEEN those CMSs never happened, now we have redundant CMS environments with all kinds of authentication, authorization and provisioning constraints. We are faced with the same problem, but much larger.

So, here’s the question I think all of my peers should be having: Where do all of our CMS systems touch in terms of data, and how do we build that backbone together? In these days of hyper-proliferation of content thanks to the modern CMS, that’s the only conversation that will push us into the next phase.

C’mon folks, don’t leave me dancin’ with myself!

Filed Under: aggregation, open source, University Web Design, WordPress Tagged With: ,
by on February 22, 2013

Marketing and Higher Education: Part 5 – Administration Creep

The final installment of this series is the most difficult for me to write. This may be due to the fact that, without a certain amount of administration creep, I would not have a job. It was only in the late 1990s that higher education institutions began creating positions like webmaster — my employment is entirely a product of the willingness to add a non-academic FTE to the payroll.

I came from 18 years in the private sector, and was not familiar with higher ed and the faculty/administration cultural divide. It took me a few years to understand the dynamic between the two forces that drive the engine of higher education, frequently grinding gears along the way. My employment takes budget money that could be used to fund a faculty position, plain and simple.

Do I feel guilty? I used to feel angry, then I felt guilty, but I’ve come around to feeling a heightened sense of responsibility to earn the right to work in higher education alongside people who made many more sacrifices than I to get a terminal degree and land a tenure-track position. In support of all those non-hired PhDs who wait for positions to open up, my husband among them, it is incumbent upon me to reflect on the ways administrative staffing costs have been choking the academic mission. I offer the following observations:

  1. Stagnant Hiring Standards: Being a citizen these days requires that you are conversant with technology. I don’t mean Microsoft Office (which you’ll see in every job description). I mean the now ubiquitous technologies of a connected society: If the person at that interview doesn’t at least understand blogging, social media, mobile computing, and the difference between a web application vs. a desktop application, they have no business in higher education today. When we re-hire vacant administrative support positions with a skillset that was created in the 1990s, we are not solving business issues for today. This will all but ensure that a new position will open up down the road to address those gaps. It’s the “We need a department webmaster/data guru/social media expert!” mentality. Creep, creep, creep…
  2. Faculty/Staff Tensions: Can we talk? Staff need to get over the big chip on our shoulders that grows from the realization that we are essentially the stagehands and will never be the lead roles in this industry. Faculty need to get over their egos and treat staff, no matter how low down the administrative food chain, like colleagues. This is not just for collegiality’s sake. It addresses the inefficiencies, duplication of effort, and communication breakdowns endemic to higher education. If you don’t know the staff like people, you will have no idea how to meet your teaching needs with the staff that are there. There are frequently people in ill-defined positions that have enormous abilities the institution does not tap. Have lunch with each other, say hi, facebook each other, get to know each other. You may not need that additional department admin afterall if you know the skills already at hand.
  3. FTE Budgeting Models: When academic or administrative departments have an FTE for administrative support, they will hoard it like no one’s business. That’s okay, and understandable, but there is then no conversation about how to share the skillsets among the various disciplines when the focus is on “our department administrative assistant.” Another model of shared staffing needs to be considered that guarantees each department is covered, but that folks can feel empowered to lend a hand to another department (horrors!) if they are particularly skillful in one area that another department needs. This also fosters a sense of cooperation and sharing among the staff as an organic result of shared work, not some ham-handed “we’re all in this together” company picnic where you wind up sitting with your department anyway. Will some folks be taken advantage of? Potentially, but if items 1 and 2 above are kept to, there should be a richer pool of talent, and we should have a cooperative enough atmosphere where we can talk it out and plan together.
  4. The False Efficiency Model: Technology does not make you more efficient. It does allow you to do more things, and creates a hunger to do even more things. Ah, the human mind. So all you VPs out there: Stop acquiring large technologies thinking it will save you money (MOOC-mania!). Start using technologies because they get you where you want to go.
  5. It’s Hard Work: I’ve heard, and shared, grumbling throughout the years about workload. Face it: We are in a time where there are fewer resources to get higher education done. As a member of the administration in a strained industry, I have to have the stomach for hard work. If you are looking to punch in, do a job, and get benefits, look somewhere else because higher education simply cannot support that kind of waiting-for-retirement model any longer. It needs people who like to work hard for the greater good.

Anecdotally, I can tell you that my own native curiosity about people, the audacity to sit at a faculty table in the cafeteria, to listen to what faculty and students do, has been of enormous benefit to me. But I know that others have better boundaries than I, or maybe greater fears of crossing that Rubicon. The culture of the institution needs to drive a sense of collegiality and shared purpose through shared work — not occasional “events” designed to throw a bone to the administrative staff with a paucity of faculty present. I think meaningful day-to-day connection works wonders for a sense of purpose in ways that a 5-year plaque or a free lunch never could.

Through shared dialogue and collaborative work, I no longer feel that resentment. The process of opening up the door to the academic side of the house has led me to ideas I simply would not have had if I had stayed in my office writing beautiful code and going to web developer conferences. Indeed, this blog was born on my realization that higher education needs to celebrate itself publicly in a world that has grown hostile to it. For my part, the open celebration of academics on the public web is possible ONLY with such administrative/faculty collaboration and understanding, and it’s becoming more important than ever. I am naive enough to believe that this type of “un-marketing” can better help to redefine public perception of higher education than any expensive branding campaign. Then again, I’ve been around higher education long enough to now believe in the unbelievable :)

Filed Under: administration, faculty, money, MOOC, social media
by on February 20, 2013

Marketing and Higher Education: Part 4 – Students are Not Customers

Imagine my delight when I came upon this student-written article at UMW regarding this very issue — it’s like this installment of my blog has written itself :) Here is the money quote:

“I am not buying a degree. I am not even buying an education. I am changing myself, I am challenging myself and I am doing so with faculty that are not providing a product, but are leading me academically. They are leading me to capacities of knowledge and understanding that prepare me for what comes next in life. I challenge the assertion that there should be a direct ratio between what I achieve here and my earning potential post-graduation.”

Public institutions of higher education do not furnish products. Indeed, they exist at taxpayer expense to ensure that our future is peopled by those who are prepared to grapple with larger questions society faces.

In my last post, I discussed how much more money is spent by for-profits on mass advertising than public and not-for-profit institutions. The result is that we have given over the answer of “What is higher education?” to cheap marketing promises of better jobs, and ignored the enormous thoughtfulness and community it takes to build a better world. And all of this using the same marketing techniques as McDonald’s, which long ago steered the question away from “How do I provide a healthy dinner for my family?” to “Do you want the sandwich or the meal?”

Make no mistake, for-profits KNOW that they are changing the conversation. Witness this little bit from a report on for-profit marketing generated by the Leads Council in 2010*:

“There appears to be a growing number of not-for-profit schools that are planning to engage in marketing activities that were previously associated almost exclusively with the for-profit sector. Specifically, more than one-quarter of marketers in the not-for- profit sector reported increased spending on both 3rd Party Affiliates (26%), and Self- Generated Online Inquiries (30%). Social media also appears to be making gains among not-for-profit marketers, with 42% of schools reporting an increase in spending in this area. Other trends include a shift in the marketing mix to include more search advertising (30% of respondents) and targeted display advertising (23% of respondents).

The survey also showed that not-for-profit schools are looking to invest in technology solutions (such as CRM and SIS systems), noting that as one of their top priorities. These investments fall just slightly behind the most commonly reported top priority for 2011 – increasing the quality of student inquiries (69% of respondents).

One could speculate that these survey results are simply reflective of a few forward-looking marketing leaders in the non-profit sector that are starting to treat ‘the student as customer’; however, it could also represent the start of a larger trend. If that’s the case, we can expect increased involvement in online marketing and inquiry generation as more schools adopt new marketing techniques and increasingly treat the student as ‘a customer/constituent.’

The question remains to be seen – is this really the year that the sleeping giant wakens and the not-for-profit sector jumps on the marketing train?”

Here is an inherent difficulty in trying to move the conversation away from this sound-bite, feel-good, all-you-can-eat quick-fix degree mill talk: Not-for-profits and publics as “catching up” to a conversation that has been manufactured solely to benefit for-profit businesses. Flipping the paradigm backwards, anxiety abounds that public institutions are the ones who have fallen behind, and that these shiny new for-profits are the real deal.

Say what?

This dynamic of big marketing to student-as-customer has significantly dumbed down the conversation about how to choose a college. Not-for-profits are now swimming upstream to reach a customer to deliver a product: A good job following graduation.

I don’t know about you, but my first job following graduation took a while to land and it was really awful. And the next job, too. Jobs are one thing — a life is another. The notion that we will enter into a career path immediately following graduation is something that is rather recent, and has its roots in the stunning shift in tuition cost and the job market. Who DOESN’T want a full-blown career path at their feet when they’ve mortgaged their future for a degree? Tuition costs have to be addressed for certain, but so do the messages we send to students and their parents about what to expect from higher education.

The fact is, the product that is higher education is one which varies in quality based on what the student brings to the table. On its face, this moves the student way past being a passive customer seeking a credential and towards a forward-thinking member of society. For-profit higher education promises that piece of paper that gets them in the first door, and good for them (if indeed that happens). But, in this day of longer careers and multiple career switches over a lifetime, the first door is not the one that really matters. It’s having the ability to walk through all the doors that remain ahead that really builds a life. You don’t get to hone the ability to adapt and grow into your future from a course or a credential — you CAN get it from immersion in higher education, emphasis on the “higher.”

This truly is a harder sell, but it’s got to be done if we care about keeping our public and not-for-profit institutions alive to do the job they were created for: building the future by fostering communities of faculty and students dedicated to answering the larger questions.

I leave you with this bit of dystopian confection should we ever lose that focus:

* From “2011 Higher Education Marketing: A Benchmark Report for For-Profit Schools“, April, 2011.
Filed Under: Uncategorized
by on January 22, 2013

Marketing and Higher Education, Part 3: Faculty Are The Message

A new year and new theories on why the higher education system is near collapse. From cost disease to administrative bloat, we love to bandy about the reasons why things are going down the tubes, to hell in a handbasket, “circling the bowl,” as a very classy mentor of mine once said.

I have no answers. But I do have concerns regarding expenditures over misguided plans to keep institutions afloat, specifically marketing strategies.

It is very difficult to find hard statistics about the amount of money spent on marketing by higher education institutions. For-profits are known to spend approximately 40% of their budgets on marketing. Non-profit and public institutions are not so easy to pin down, but estimates from CASE and Forbes, as well as marketing firms online urging colleges to increase marketing spending (gotta love it) suggest that it is less than 1%.

This discrepancy allows consultants to exploit potential client anxieties about needing more marketing dollars. But, really, even if non-profits and publics were to double their current marketing budgets, there would simply be no way to compete on a level playing field within the traditional marketing/advertising arena. When I see small institutions doing things like elaborate brand positioning projects, billboards, and print ads, I can’t help but cringe thinking of the faculty salaries that didn’t get raised, or the new faculty positions that didn’t get approved,  as a result of these expenditures.

I first got into the brand and identity management field in the early 90s. Back then, it was a luxury of larger companies. Very few universities, save the most wealthy, had deep enough pockets for things like consultants in brand management and communications planning. But the obsession with branding seems to have permeated our culture, and now it seems that everyone wants to be a brand.

The damage from this is that, by distilling the message about what a University is through these brand-building exercises, so many things fall away from the rich aggregate of what makes up the personality of an institution of higher education. The very act of branding is one where decisions are made about projecting the five or six main strengths of an institution, thereby denying the rich and at times chaotic nature of higher education culture. The kind of delicious chaos that, if exposed rather than distilled, could actually look exciting to a young student staring down the barrel of four years of college and even more years of debt.

The fact is, institutions are teeming with scholars who publish, and speak, and debate, and travel, and influence thinking. By locking faculty away from the public, and cherry-picking which faculty stories “support the brand,” we are ignoring the very thing that makes institutions of higher education such amazing places to be.

At most institutions, central communications/public relations/marketing offices discourage faculty from directly contacting the media. The reason for this has to do with the desire to coordinate the message. I get that, but the traditional media is decreasingly important, particularly when you are talking about smaller schools whose media coverage is local, and whose pool of desired applicants may live far outside of news outlets giving coverage.

Fortunately, faculty and their students participating in social media and open learning environments are creating copious amounts of the most elusive element of any communications plan: CONTENT!  Remember content? It’s what people start to think of only AFTER the website launches with the cool taglines, colors, and brand positioning statements.

But the cool thing about academic content is that there is no end game with respect to the institution itself. The very act of discourse and debate becomes an object lesson in citizenship, a window to how learning behind high school can be so dynamic and freeing. What academic content does is not target the consumer, but capture the imagination. There is no end game but the game in itself, and by opening up conversation on the web, anyone can be a part of it.

It is not enough to do feature stories on faculty, although I applaud institutions that even try to do these kinds of profiles. They are realizing that the academic work of the institution, not its tagline, IS the personality of the institution. But too many marketing and communications offices are isolated from faculty. They work in different buildings, eat lunch at different times, hold different hours, and communicate largely by email.

Imagine a world where reportage about faculty activities were no longer about soliciting and writing features from a central office of public relations staff. Imagine embedding courageous and innovative communications folks with technology and new media chops into the academic areas. This would allow them to build relationships with the academic side of the house, from where they can facilitate faculty- and student-generated content being exposed to the world. This would position those who communicate about the university into the heart of where the activity is, making it much less likely that they will miss an opportunity to catch a great lecture, or have informal discussions with some amazing students.

Discussions about intellectual property are part and parcel of such a strategy, but I’d like the opportunity to HAVE that discussion. I’d like the opportunity to address a faculty member, not as a potential “story,” or a news release, but as a partner in bringing the academic conversation outside the walls of the institution, inviting the best and the brightest to join in. The faculty HAVE the message at their fingertips. Why in the world aren’t we listening until they publish or win awards?

I know from living with an academic: It’s the discoveries that keep in him the lab late at night, the “aha” synthesis of papers read and digested, that are the excitement, the thrill of the academic career. That’s gold that can be best mined in real-time, and WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY. I’d sure like to see us use it.

Filed Under: aggregation, communication, open education, social media
by on December 2, 2012

Marketing and Higher Education: Part 2 – The Dreaded Website That Won’t Go Away

Scientists running for the ice cream truck.

© Gary Larsen, “The Far Side”

I’ve posted in this space, and spoken at conferences, about the ridiculous importance that is placed on the design of home pages of higher education institution websites (and by extension, that of their respective schools, centers, and departments). What I have not addressed is why that emphasis is misplaced not only in terms of how the web functions, but in how much money it sucks away from advancing to more creative uses of the web beyond web sites alone.

Nothing gets higher education folks to think about the web more than an opportunity for bunch of highly intelligent over-educated people to sit in a room together, in true “Far Side” style, and argue passionately about photos, colors and placement of a logo. When the design by committee is complete, further discussion on how to use the web effectively retreats. The web design consultant is paid a large sum for her/his effort, the staff has a launch party, and all that great ice-cream-truck energy by all those amazing minds dissipates, or focuses on more important topics, like parking :)

In my experience, it is very hard to breathe life back into the web conversation beyond that launch. What was so very important during the design phase becomes a simple maintenance chore that is hardly noticed except for the occasional typo or out-of-date content, which, upon reaching critical mass in a few years, usually gets the redesign cycle started again.

In these days of increasingly strapped budgets for higher ed, the model of big design projects every few years is a huge suck of resources for which there is little demonstrable (read: quantitatively measurable) payoff. There are many factors that play into this desire for sweeping redesign projects:

  1. Changes in Leadership: A new leader will frequently lead to the desire for a new image to be projected.
  2. Changes in Technology: That spiffy CMS from 5 years ago is not so spiffy as it was when the now-gone consultant sold it to you. It may not support current standards, or may not allow for newer functionality (rich media, mobile responsiveness, etc) that have become standard website fare.
  3. Accumulated Negative Feedback: Prospective students may voice complaints to admissions officers. Current students may complain about resources being difficult to find. Parents may email about not being able to find what they want on the website.
  4. The Unpredictable: Found money, a major donor complaint, a negative event that makes leadership perceive that their website is becoming a liability.

I do not dispute the legitimacy of these factors (well, #1 is kind of irritating :) . What I DO dispute is that a full-out website re-build is the answer. I propose rather than a rebuild of the institutional website that there be a re-thinking of how the web is being occupied by the institution and all its constituents. Then, one can adequately craft a strategy that places the institutional website, as an entity, within the context of the many possible places and ways that the institution needs to live on the web.

Notice that I am not saying “you need a social media strategy” or “you need to be mobile.” It’s not that simple, or simplistic. There’s nothing worse (or more ubiquitous, I fear) than marketing-driven social media strategies or developer-driven mobile strategies. What I advocate for is more of an institutional consciousness-raising about what the web means in an era when it can be carried in someone’s pocket as an extension of themselves, rather than confronted on a screen within the contrived setup of a desktop computer in the home, office, or a public library.

When the web is that personal, and when the content that’s being shared is moving in multiple directions at a rapid pace, having all one’s energy placed in this lovely pixel-perfect website (or picture-perfect responsive mobile website) is still presenting content within the old mindset. I see large institutional websites today as we were beginning to see encyclopedias just a decade ago: quaint, comforting, but irrelevant.

The world is moving on from the website phenomenon. The developing world is accessing information on their phones, which is NOT A DESIGN ISSUE. Changing the device from one that was designed to consume information (the PC) to one that interacts with others (a mobile device) is a sea change in the meaning of the content itself to the individual. Although responsive design is a neat trick (and I’m doing it myself now), it’s essentially wrapping up the old website-as-monolith approach in a package that is readable on a small screen. In doing it, I feel somewhat as though I’m rearranging the chairs on the Titanic, while troubled by the sight of a not-so-distant iceberg.

Responsive design is not a paradigm shift towards a mobile web. It’s just kicking the can down the road, avoiding the conversation that needs to happen which is: What does your institution need to do to jump into the conversation and stay there, rather than publish, publish, publish reams of content (with great colors and photos) that may or may not get read because no one’s asking for it, or it serves no purpose other than to make us all feel good about how we look to the outside world.

Growing up, I was the youngest of a very big, very loud and opinionated family. As a result, jumping into the conversation was intimidating at best. I learned how to play the piano and sing, and that got me attention, it got me lots of compliments. But, it didn’t change the nature of the dinner table conversation, and it didn’t allow me to enter into it with any greater ease.

In these days of economic ennui and creeping anti-intellectualism, higher education needs to feel relevant to people outside the campus walls. Putting all the web budget eggs into the basket of a huge beautiful website, redesigned every couple of years like the old World Books of my youth, does nothing to put higher education institutions into the larger conversation. Folks may throw you a compliment, and think you are swell, but pitching your relevance means more than that. It means using the web as a place, not to publish stories about, but to open up conversations that place the institution at the center of society.

That portends a different way of budgeting those web dollars. Here is what I propose:

1) De-emphasize expensive content management systems and one-off web design firms. Open source has come a long way and anyone that’s still paying for content management and expensive “web design” firms is wasting their money. Period. Get a great graphic designer to consult and staff yourself with a team of eager, talented web developers. Believe me, we are everywhere in higher ed, and hungry for work. Take that money you saved and get a good document management system and enterprise calendaring system. They will make the business end of your website a whole lot easier, while supporting internal processes much more efficiently.

2) Encourage digital literacy throughout the institution, including ubiquitous the use of free social media tools, open online courses (DS 106 for starters), freedom of access to low-cost tools (Domain of One’s Own, anyone), and a spirit from the top down that recognizes the non-squariness of the new public square, which is everywhere. Make it no longer okay for upper administration to joke about not being able to “get” the web, or to use their laptop as a paperweight. It’s no longer okay for anyone on staff to deride technology as hard to understand. Our students live in a very different space, and if you are not there as a matter of your daily job, they don’t see you. Don’t wait for IT to come and hook up a videoconferencing system — get your mug on Google hangouts, and get it done. If it’s interesting, capture it and share. The web is so easy, it’s, as Jim Groom would say, “SICK.”

3) Support digitizing live content: So many cool things are talked about on college campuses every day of the week. I get TED talks on my ROKU box, and that’s great. But when I watch them, I think of all the great conversations I’ve had with faculty and students in my work, and wonder what an amazing, learning-hungry world it would be if so many more of those conversations were public. Have new media and videographers on staff as a ubiquitous part of the culture, and enable decentralized publishing of video DAILY.

4) Get your Authentication House in Order: To make these tools work together, a solid, united authentication mechanism is needed. This is not a high-cost proposition — it’s another cultural issue of having the conversation and getting it done. A solid identity management system can be the magic that makes all of the above plug-and-play much more gracefully together.

5) Leverage Institutional Data Webservices: Explore any opportunities you have to create connections on the web between people by virtue of institutional data. If you have any systems available that list faculty and their courses, or their publications and social media activity, use webservices and identity management sytems as much as you can to tie it all together. Your web development staff will eat this with a spoon.

I can still play the piano and sing, and do it in my basement a lot :) But, higher education institutions need more than to be admired and placed on a pedestal, far from the reach of the larger society. Take it from me: you feel better when you can also have a seat at the table, and are being taken seriously as part of the conversation. Prospective students may just listen when they have a seat there, too, instead of being shouted out from a pretty web site. Being part of the conversation is a LOT more fun than shouting, and who doesn’t need more fun?

Filed Under: design, money, open education, open source, recruiting, University Web Design
by on November 30, 2012

Marketing and Higher Education: Part 1 – Can We Talk?

It’s no secret to those who know and love me that I have long been wary of the idea of applying traditional marketing concepts to higher education institutions. I don’t come by this lightly, or out of some sort of ivory-tower snobbery. I come by this point of view through experience, coupled with a touch of skepticism at the outset. I come by this having worked inside the higher ed online communications business alongside IT-types and marketing/public relations types.

What started as a frustration with the carrying over of print principles to the electronic realm has become more like a desire for full-on revolution in how we present higher education institutions to the larger world. But this is something I cannot cover in a single post. At least I think I can’t, so I’d like to break this down into a theory on which I will blog over the coming weeks.

For now, I’d like to set the stage for what I hope will be a creative deconstruction of what’s happened, what’s happening now, and how those of us whose profession it is to maintain relevance for higher education in the public conversation are quickly careening into a ditch if we do not fundamentally shift the way we do things. This will require that we acknowledge the following:

  1. The Dreaded Web Site That Won’t Go Away: The web is no longer a collection of “sites,” but a medium for rapid, and potentially, transformative exchange of ideas. The obsession with authoring websites has to pivot to something deeper — like BEING on the web, not authoring TO it. Yet the bulk of higher ed budgets for the web is still in the development (in-house our outsourced) of the authoring and management of “sites.” We are missing the revolution.
  2. Faculty Are The Message: The sooner Universities let faculty work speak for the institutions, the less marketing will need to be crafted to speak for the faculty, who are the core shapers of higher education experience. Conversely, faculty have to be aware of their importance to the message, bypass the gatekeepers, and take responsibility for exposing your work to the world. The tools are there now for you to do it. Use them.
  3. Students Are Not Customers:  This model of student as customer is an unfortunate given in discussions within marketing communications and admissions conversations. It sounds clever, and it allows marketing professionals to pitch buzzword-laden ideas in ways that make them sound student-savvy. The student is NOT a customer, but an active participant in crafting a life full of thought, wonder, curiousity, community, and memories. They are an active participant in shaping their education, not a passive participant in consuming it.
  4. Administration Creep: I’m part of the overhead of an institution. For every one of me, there is one faculty member that is not hired. If I am not performing at full capacity in my job, I need to find another industry to hide in. Higher education needs to stop putting money towards unproductive clerks and fancy residence halls and pour whatever extra funds they have into faculty, programs, and that little thing called “learning.”

I will tackle each of these topics over the coming weeks. Hope you’ll join me and yell at me all the way to the unemployment office!

Filed Under: communication, social media, University Web Design
by on November 11, 2012

The Religious Wars of Web Development

I have true faith in the one and only divine triumvirate: LAMP, WordPress, and Open Source. My faith is unshakable. I will go to my grave in humble servitude to the wisdom of the platform. All praise and honor.

Not.

Honest to goodness, if you want to get folks riled up just send out an email to a webmasters’ listserv and ask for the best CMS out there. You will see all of the action of a Civil War Re-enactment, and all the blood of the original. I don’t know if it’s the inherent Asperger’s-like nature of web developers (I count myself among them, so I am copping to my own tendencies here), but ask folks to step outside their comfort zones and consider other technologies and you will here all sorts of strong reactions that make you think you’ve just evoked some PTSD hallucination of abuse at the hands of some frantic CIO, or maybe a creepy uncle they’d rather just forget.

In my new position, someone sent out such an email. I responded with my experiences with WordPress, and the battle began. Team PHP took some hard attacks for security, as did Team WordPress (from those who used it and abadoned in sometime in 2005). Team Expression Engine landed a couple of good blows with search and page management, but lost consciousness briefly as its usability and extensibility landed it on the ropes. More blows to WordPress and its lack of scalability, its inherent vulnerabilities, its all-too-openness (AH!!!), and it seemed as though WP and PHP were down for the count.

But, not so fast. At the last minute, the fatal blow laid bare by a participant who shall remain nameless, but who shared the following:

The White House and the federal government are committed to PHP—we’re doing a lot of work in WordPress and Drupal. On the White House GitHub repository (https://github.com/whitehouse), you’ll see that two of the four projects are in PHP, including the source of petitions.whitehouse.gov (a Drupal installation profile) and the White House Drupal theme. PHP is preferred for this work precisely because of its security, its great track record for patching holes, and because of its very, very broad user base, including the bulk of the world’s most popular websites (Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Paypal, Amazon.com, and American Express all spring to mind), many of which handle confidential data and credit cards without difficulty.

This truly was a fun moment of vindication for open source and PHP. But, the larger point is how quickly minds can close within the collective of the web development community. Highly analytical, and at the same time tending to cling to dogmas when challenged. But things move so very fast each year, exponentially so, that there really is no time to cling to the tried-and-true. There is always some new platform, some new theory, some new practice that truly does improve the user AND authoring experience. It takes a nimble, eager mind to keep abreast of all the changes. It’s just too early to put any stake in the ground and say “Eureka!”

I’ve been in this higher education web game for going on 13 years, and every “Eureka!” experience has been followed by two years of upheaval in the idea of “best practices,” rendering that precious feeling of discovery into yesterday. So the problem seems to exist within the dated paradigm of how we define “expert”: How do you become an “expert” in a technology when you are being asked to move from one way of doing things to another every two years or so? Then, once becoming an “expert,” how do you shape professional development to ensure continued relevance?

There is no easy answer to these questions. However, I have a few suggestions of where to start.

Kill the Webmaster: First, there is this notion of “webmaster” which was full of goofy and “expert-y” soundingness when we first embarked on this brave new world in the 90s. Back then, the person running your UNIX environment wrote html and did a little image manipulation to make things look not so hideous. It was when the emphasis was on the “T” in html, and the expertise on making that text look presentable within a web browser resided largely within the webmaster’s head. That world got delegated to that person, and the webmaster monster was created. It’s time we got out the torches and pitchforks because that paradigm is no longer relevant. I urge institutions to divest themselves of this notion of a webmaster. There is no forward-looking web work that goes on within a single person’s head. Great work on the web happens in teams and projects that take advantage of a multiplicity of disciplines that bring many voices to the table: server security, performance, usability, aesthetics, etc. As much webmasters tend to LIKE being regarded as experts in all of these things, that person does not exist. That is a team of communicators, artists, in some cases educators, and technologists working together without the bottleneck of pseudo-expertise that the term “webmaster” brings to the table. What’s more, with mobile experiences and social media, the notion of “website” and “web” has become quaint at best. The notion of digital experiences seems more relevant, where “web” is a component of it, but not the best at describing the end-game which is great ways for people to have a quality life in the online world.

Outsource Selectively: ”Build or Buy” is a term I’ve heard many times, but it’s a binary that need not exist. Once you realize that you may not have all the skills needed to create the expert-monster of your dreams, you need not dig your heels in and say you will do it all in-house OR put yourself completely in the hands of an outside contractor. Know that the more you ask the contractor to do for you, the more you may have to go back to them for changes. So, when staffing, staff for the skills you need to maintain the site, and pay for the ones you need to get the project up in the first place. This does not work very well with the way lots of “web design” shops do their projects. Folks want to sell you the full enchilada: information architecture, wireframes, development, design, implementation. But, you may have on staff the ability to do all but the graphic design. In that case, only outsource what you need. It will take a bit of wrangling with them, and everyone will try to upsell you, but don’t buy something you cannot fix and live with yourself. I delivered our firm a 50-page tome of project specs done in-house. We just needed their graphic design wonderfulness and more hands at the code than we could deliver in the project timeframe. But we chose the platform, and walked with them through the code at every step to make sure we’d inherit something we could work with when the contract was long since completed.

Embrace Community: Every web developer, frontend, backend, and inbetween, needs to accept that community brings with it the luxury of a back office without the cost. Community can point you in the directions you need to go to accomplish your goals. Expertise seems to live very well in the aggregate of humanity, not so much within individuals, so keep asking, watching, and looking at what others are doing. Google is great, but it’s not the only way to find information. Conferences can be fun, but absorbing new information should be a daily vitamin we are all taking online.

Expect Change: Be on the look out for what’s down the road, NOT so you can become an expert in it, but so that you can assess which areas of expertise will be needed to tackle it. Then, make sure your team is poised to learn these things, that you can bring your own value and learn a new thing or two that’s more in your area of interest, and that you are looking at communities to help support your choices.

Folks in 12-step programs learn an early and valuable lesson: “I don’t know who god is, but I know it’s not me.” The sooner that web “experts” learn this, the better we will become at dialogue, the more effective we will be at putting together teams and communities that support great work together.

Perhaps a godless web development community will be a more humane and stimulating one to inhabit. I sure would like the religious crusades to stop, and the minds in our profession to open up to not having to know everything all the time. That’s an outdated mantle that we can shed — knowing everything (almost) what community is for, and I embrace it.

Filed Under: communication, design, open source, University Web Design Tagged With: , ,
by on October 28, 2012

Small Fish

You know why I loved NYC so much? There are many reasons, but I think the biggest one was the anonymity. The sheer scale of the place made it impossible to be fully noticed, fully known. You could shape communities wherever you needed to, and otherwise simply co-exist amongst the millions and millions you would never know. You could do great work and, if you choose to, make your life all about that and pursue recognition. You could do great work and, if you choose to, go home and have a life. I always sought the latter, giving priority to rehearsals, performances, songwriting, comedy writing, and hanging out with my friends.

All of this is what made the last twelve years of my life as a “big fish in a little pond” feel so enormously uncomfortable. I didn’t even realize it until I got out of it and am now immersed again in a large culture that cares little about what I do on a day-to-day basis. As with my life in NYC, I am free to concentrate on doing great work (hopefully) and ignoring superfluous political chatter. As with NYC, there is a clear line of advancement should I choose to pursue that road as well. But, with my home and family being of utmost importance these days, the former remains just fine for me.

An unhealthiness was overtaking me in my previous position directing all things public web at a small institution. The work I did was highly visible, but the position was buried deep into the organization. This would leave anyone in this position, at any point in time, with a feeling of being torn between needing MORE authority to match the visibility and accountability or wanting to take few risks, commensurate with the low position. I’m not one to eschew risk, and I am not one for wanting more authority. So, my entire career at UMW was summed up as taking risks hoping not to get caught or taking risks and hoping someone would actually notice what great risks I was taking, they would “get it” and want to push the organization further into new territories.

The reality is, I left with the main discussion by the powers that be still being about the home page design, who gets to decide what it looks like, who gets a link, and why or why not. I failed in even budging the conversation from the comfortable perch it rested on when I arrived.

My new job will hopefully allow me to become right-sized again, and concentrate only on the work, good work, and nothing but the work. I like being so buried that what I do quietly holds up a small corner of the organization. When I fail, it will be a small fixable crack, not a public debacle. When I triumph, I’ll learn how to do something new, maybe I’ll get a nice email, most likely not. Either way, I can smile, go to my car, go home, kiss my husband, and hug my kids with no grander expectations, no false sense of importance, no expectations to shift any paradigm this way or that.

I like being a small fish.

 

Filed Under: University Web Design Tagged With:
by on October 8, 2012

Charting a Life

It’s time to go. I have five more days at the University of Mary Washington (4.5 really) and I’m crazy with feelings. Most of all, I’m feeling scared out of my mind.

It’s kind of liberating at the age of 53 to actually feel scared of something as mundane as a new job. I feel the way I did in my transition from college to the working world (except, I can’t live in my parents’ basement in the interim — a shame really).

Right now, I’ve got the “have I got good enough clothes” kinda stress. The kind that you have school-in-your-pajamas nightmares about. I’m not in my high-fallutin’ mindset thinking about the new things I’ll work on in a new space, the conversations I’ll have (and no doubt start…and no doubt end). No, none of that high-minded stuff for me. I’m thinking about whether I can get another three months out of those black leather stacked-heel pumps from Century 21 in Bay Ridge, and whether I should send everything to the dry cleaners or do Dryel to save money.

I’m thinking about jobs of yore. In my old job in New York City, I worked for a brand identity management firm. A big one. The kind that does big car companies, airlines, and cell phone companies and stuff. I could brand-name drop my name into a stupor with the projects I worked on, but I never much cared about it. My old boss said that’s why I was good at the job :)

One day, I asked the CEO (who was a very not-nice person, but who liked me — not-nice people tend to like me because they don’t scare easily), anyway, I asked him how in the world do you prove that any brand identity has any effect on the actual bottom line business for your clients. The answer that this millionaire Wharton school graduate gave me was something that has stuck with me to this day: “You can’t.” It was said with a bit of an internal wink, as if to say, when you resort to using statistics to measure quality, you’re already in hot water because you’ve sliced some part of your brain off. The part that knows when something is “good.”

Nevertheless, in higher education, I’ve seen a drive to move away from the qualitative to the quantitative. So, I’d like to mash up the two approaches to business I’ve learned in the last 20 years, and attempt to quantify the unquantifiable. I’m doing this by summing up my twelve year career at UMW using highly subjective measurements. Here is my DS106-inspired visual analysis  – suitable for Tracdat™, or, as MAD Magazine says, “For wrapping fish.”:

Areas I Reported To

The majority of my tenure here was within IT, but I was bounced between the marketing people and the techies throughout. I’ll never tell where I felt most at home.

My Bosses

I’ve had 8 bosses of varying degrees of competence. Unfortunately, “Horrendous” has the largest number. The one “Amazing” boss I had was worth the others. And the two “great” ones could have been “amazing” if the “amazing” one weren’t so “amazing.”

Here’s a highly subjective rating of three aspects of major projects I’ve completed in my time here. Rating on a scale of 1 to 10 for Technical Difficulty, Cultural Difficulty, and Success.

Here’s that same data mapped over the terms of the 4 UMW Presidents I served under.

Success under Presidents

Seems like my feeling of success plummeted through those two middle ones, no? Also, the cultural difficulties did not diminish, but, if this data has any meaning at all, I seem to have gained a sense of success in spite of it all under President Hurley.

Finally, my personal favorite. My job titles since joining UMW, measured by subjective orders of magnitude for “ridiculous,” 1 being perectly normal, 10 being “afraid to print a business card embarrassing.”

Job Titles at UMW

It’s a wonder anyone has hired me away given my checkered resume of titles at UMW.

Okay, I’ve had my fun, and to be honest, I could do this stuff all day. But, right now, I just want to be grateful to have a job, grateful to be going to a new job, and grateful to be scared to be flying from the nest that UMW has been for me. I am going to miss my friends here terribly, and that’s the hardest part of going, but I’ll think about that tomorrow.

Now, I think I have some dry cleaning to drop off and some shoes to buy. Maybe even splurge on a purse at Goodwill. Yes, that’s the ticket.

Filed Under: Macromedia Contribute, University Web Design Tagged With: ,
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